In today’s competitive environment, companies have to innovate rapidly to stay ahead of their competition, improve profitability, create new services and revenue streams, and reduce risks by adopting cost efficient business models.

The increased business pressure has a direct impact on the IT organization to innovate rapidly and efficiently meet the ever demanding business needs. At the same time, CIOs are struggling with the legacy, siloed, underutilized IT infrastructure and operational processes that were built based on the requirements of individual enterprise applications and processes. The end result is increased total cost of ownership and inability to help business be more agile, introduce new services, and achieve operational efficiency.

We’re at a very exciting time in our industry. There is a shift underway to mobile devices and cloud computing, both of which have exciting ramifications for unleashing a new wave of productivity in the enterprise. But don’t think that scammers aren’t benefiting off this wave as well. They are also enjoying an increase in productivity.

We’ve wrapped up an action-packed week at Partner Velocity in Barcelona, Spain where Cisco partners learned, not only to change their way of thinking about marketing, but also to use social media in innovative ways.

I had a chance to interview speaker and creative director of Thinque Anders Sorman-Nilsson about ideas and how to “thinque funky.”

Anders says that in a highly digital world, high touch (and appealing to our customers’ hearts and emotions) is key. He also talked about thought leaders, those who have unleashed their own inner super heroes, who blaze a trail in new thinking.

What else did partners learn at the event? Here are just a few memorable quotes from speakers.

After jumping on two planes, and lugging along all of my video equipment, I’ve made it to Barcelona, Spain, for Partner Velocity, which is taking place this week. This annual event brings together thought leaders from across the marketing world to talk and engage with our partners, helping them learn the latest marketing tips and tricks.

Today I had the chance to host a Ustream broadcast with Scott Klososky, the former CEO of three startups. Scott filled us in on cloud computing, one of the most disruptive technologies since the advent of the Internet. Scott will be hosting a session here at Partner Velocity titled “What Is the Cloud and Why Should I Care?” With that as the jumping point for our discussion, we had a far-ranging talk on why cloud is critical right now.

Here’s a replay of the broadcast:

Want to read more about what we talked about? Read on for a recap. We also have information about our next Ustream broadcast, which is on hosting a Ustream broadcast, scheduled for tomorrow, at 11:45 a.m. CET.

Lew has been telling a pretty simple story since he came to Cisco earlier this year: cloud computing may be the latest term describing how the Internet is enabling new IT and business models, but if there’s one company that already understands how the Internet changes business models, it’s Cisco.

Yes, Cloud computing is a little different to Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The proliferation of smarter mobile devices, the explosion of rich media and social applications and the expectation of users to be able to access content anywhere and anytime are newer trends that weren’t around in previous eras, but they simply reinforce something that has been true for more than a decade: the network has become the most important technology in advancing new computing paradigms.

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